Waffle

If you live within driving distance of Nashville, Tennessee and are interested in medieval art, crafts, culture or manuscripts or early Christian history, you can't afford to miss Medieval Treasures from te Cleveland Museum of art at the Frist Center for the Visual Arts, running until June 7, 2009. Seeing the illuminations, sculpture, jewelry, calligraphy and paintings in the exhibit has been a perspective-changer for me as all of it showed a level of craftsmanship and especially individuality that I hadn't previously been aware of as far as medieval art is concerned.

Medieval culture and art are not taught well in schools - in mine the entire period and the entire continent to which the term applied were treated as an amorphous, unchanging, uninteresting blob. I'm not sure how it could have been done better though - most historians who teach at secondary school level simply don't have the expertise and haven't been taught it themselves. Add to that the fact that medieval art doesn't reproduce well (in fact, I've bought the catalogue and have been looking at it and it just doesn't come near capturing the brilliance of it all - gold colours wash out in manuscripts but are overemphasized in some pictures of some of the sculptures, detail is blurred and fine lines in miniatures get lost in the printing process) and it becomes very difficult to communicate to people who haven't seen it in real life, just how brilliant it is. But it is brilliant, and you should see it if you can.

As I sit here, Aggie is reading the catalog and correcting mistakes in it. She's an absolute sucker for stuff like this. Update: She just ruined half the catalogue for me by pointing out that many of the shadows on the photos of the sculpture have been photoshopped on, and some of them qualify as Photoshop disasters. That book is only good to be a souvenir of the exhibit, and it's too expensive for that.

(Meanwhile, here's what all else we've done on our vacation. On the day I arrived, Aggie's dog was killed in an accident, which put a damper on our reunion. Also, Aggie's youngest son was sick with Fifth Disease, so we took it easy for a few days for his sake and didn't go on any outings. On Tuesday, I crashed with the fatigue of three difficult months at work, and on Wednesday, we bought baby chicks for the minifarm, and I crashed again, sleeping away the whole afternoon. Oh, and we shopped for engagement rings - a lot. We eventually got what we wanted, but it'll need some work done and I won't see the finished product until after I return to the Netherlands. Aggie will send me pictures of it and I told her I'll photoshop a presentation box around it and present that to her while I propose to her. Having told you people that, I may even follow through on it and do just that)

In the comments to last week's Invasion episode on ROCR.net, reader TuuronTour asks:

Is this storyline going to be the final end of ROCR? I get the feeling everything is being wrapped up to get our rogue's a well-earned "and they liveth long and happily".

Tuur is almost right: the ending to Invasion doesn't so much wrap everything up as set things up so that I have the largest number of possibilities open. It'll be a while before the world will see a sequel to Invasion, but when I decide, in a year or so, to pick up where I left, I can treat the next story as essentially a new series, with a new cast of characters: Tamlin, Ragnarok, Atra, Jake, Owen, Hildegard, and... one more, with their offspring. It won't be necesary for new readers to learn the backstory - this new lot will be the gang. Older readers will still enjoy the similarities and differences between, say, original Atra and rejuvenated Atra, or be able to see the Tamlin-Ragnarok dynamic in the light of the dynamic that there used to be.

Or... I might scrap that plan altogether, bring Kel and Jodoque back a few years down the line, fast-forwarding to the year 1010. Either way works for me.

Before then, though, I will work on the three remaining stories set in the "old" ROCR universe: Feral, King Groy and Muscle. I am now writing material for Feral and while the first batch of new writing came out as drivel, there are some salvageable elements in it that should get the story moving again. I expect to be taking a few weeks off before I get around to posting any new comics though, and when I do, they will almost certainly be irregular again.

There's also the possibility of a spin-off comic set in the Wodeskog, based on the faerie village and what else might be living there. That's another thing that may or may not happen though.

Next: one more digital drawing. It's an inked version of the penciled character drawing of Aleas I did some six months ago:

I have a working SCSI card again, and though it uses a different cable configuration than I described earlier, I know what cable that is and where to find it. I may balk a bit at the cost but will probably put in the order soon, as the alternatives aren't too appealing. I have had a few items scanned at a local scanner service, but at a price of € 5 a scan and a maximum resolution of 400 DPI (NOT good enough for archiving or indeed for submission to a professionally printed magazine), the cable price becomes worth paying very quickly.

It may still be a few days before I can scan at home again, and today after testing the card, I spent some time exploring yet another alternative: all-digital drawing. I've had tablets for years, and do a lot of work with them, but until today, I had never created more than a doodle from scratch in any art software. Today, I changed that by drawing this:

It was a bit awkward for me to work on as I found it hard to draw some of the curves. I undid the jawline a few dozen times before getting one that was good enough. But the result, while flawed, is flawed in pretty much the same ways as my hand-drawn work, so for a first attempt, it's very encouraging. The image is used in the new cast pages on Modern Tales and I will try and do a full-body portrait this weekend. Total time less than an hour and likely to get faster with practice.

Aggie posted this lovely Invasion-based drawing on her blog as a birthday present to me:
Fay watches on as Kel cuts up a fish. By Aggie. Click to enlarge.
Thank you, sweetheart! I love you too!